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Free Daily and Weekly Opinion Summaries for all Federal Courts and selected State Supreme Courts
Justia Opinion Summaries, Justia is providing FREE Daily & Weekly Opinion Summaries for all Federal Courts, and selected State Supreme Courts. U.S. Federal Courts, U.S. State Courts, Opinion Summaries by Practice Area. Justia offers free case opinion summary newsletters for many US Appellate Courts. To sign up for the Case Summary Newsletters you first need to login to or create a Justia Account. Then you will be able to select the free newsletters you wish to subscribe to. Subscribe to summaries of US appellate court opinions at Daily.Justia.com. Practice area emails with summaries from all reviewed courts are sent weekly. Hat tip to Sabrina I. Pacifici! Continue reading
Arkansas Law Reports: no books, just database
Abandoning Law Reports for Official Digital Case Law by Peter W. Martin, Cornell Law School (January 25, 2011) Cornell Legal Studies Research Paper No. 11-01.
In 2009, Arkansas ended publication of the Arkansas Reports. Since 1837 this series of volumes, joined in the late twentieth century by the Arkansas Appellate Reports covering the state's intermediate court of appeals, had served as the official record of Arkansas's case law. For all decisions handed down after February 12, 2009, not books but a database of electronic documents "created, authenticated, secured, and maintained by the Reporter of Decisions" constitute the "official report" of all Arkansas appellate decisions. With justifiable pride, the state supreme court proclaimed Arkansas to be the first jurisdiction in the nation to switch from law report publication to official legal data distribution. It will not be the last. This article examines what distinguishes this Arkansas reform from the widespread cessation of public law report publication that occurred during the twentieth century and its reporter's official database from the opinion archives hosted at the judicial websites of most U.S. appellate courts (including that of the Arkansas judicial branch between 1996 and 2009). The article next explores the distinctive alignment of factors that both led and enabled the Arkansas judiciary to take a step that courts in other jurisdictions, state and federal, have so far resisted.Big Hat Tip to Sabrina I. Pacifici! Continue reading
My $3.52 Worth of PACER
As you might have noticed, I was inspired to register for a PACER account because of the presentation from the Six State Virtual Conference. Today I'd like to share my brief initial experience with PACER. I received my password a few hours after applying for it. Today I logged into PACER and decided to look for documents related to Perry et al v. Schwarzenegger. I realize that some documents in this case are already publicly available, but I wanted something to search that I knew would be in the system. First I clicked on the database link for the Northern District of California, since I knew the case was heard in San Francisco. The resulting search screen offered my several choices, including searching by attorney name. I tried Theodore Olsen, knowing he was one of the attorneys. I got back two cases, but neither was Perry et al v. Schwarzenegger. I was charged $0.08. According to PACER documentation, I would have been charged $0.08 even if I had zero results. So I did a quick Google search to learn that Perry's first name was Kristen and did a party search for Kristen Perry. I immediately got Case Number 3:09-ev-02292-VRW, better known as Perry et al v. Schwarzenegger. This also cost me $0.08, but since I got a useful result, I didn't mind. I looked at the Case Summary ($0.08). I looked at the Case File Location ($0.08) and determined the case files might still be with Judge Walker. Then I looked at the Docket Report. There were 742 files associated with the case. PACER determined that this should be charged as 30 pages or $2.40. Browsing through the list I decided to pull up a 10 page letter from "Voter X" which was sent to Judge Walker during the trial. This person said they feared retaliation from pro-same sex marriage forces and represented themselves as just one of the many voters who voted for Prop 8. The letter was written like a legal brief and I suspect the author was an attorney or paralegal. Viewing and downloading this letter cost me $0.80. By now I had spent $3.52. PACER waives $10/quarter, so if I stop here, I won't be charged this quarter. But what if I wanted to look at multiple documents?. At $0.08 a page, I had 81 pages left. And if I reloaded the Docket Report a few times instead of remembering to open documents into a new browser tab, I could have only opened up a document or two before getting charged for real, because each refresh of the Docket Report would have been another $2.40/30 pages. I started playing with PACER to see if it was worth recommending registration to those library patrons looking to retrieve federal court documents. I need to think about it some more, but at the moment my feeling is that $10.00 worth of free access doesn't go very far. And it would probably be used up quickest by the very patrons I would want to recommend it to. Folks who may want a lot of briefs and filings but who are not great searchers. But I haven't totally made up my mind about this. What do you think? If you work in a non-court library, have you gotten patrons to register for PACER? What has been your experience? I do suggest that librarians should register for PACER accounts and search around to see what's available. Then decide for yourselves whether to lobby Congress to free this resource so people can explore the law without watching the meter. Continue reading
Problems with Accessibility of California Law
Law student, Robb Shecter, who has created the OregonLaws.Org web site, wrote us recently about the fact that California Codes have accessibility issues:
The California Codes are published online (http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/calaw.html) with crucial information absent (removed?) that renders them nearly impossible to use: No Section names ("leadlines") are present in this version-for-the-public. For example, the Sections relevant to the California Highway Patrol are presented like this: http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/displaycode?section=veh&group=02001-03000&file=2250-2269 The sections are thus relatively unusable, greatly increasing the cost of legal research and defeating access and transparency for nearly all people. The missing information is also crucial for third parties (like me) who'd like to create easy-to-use directories of the codes. The needed information does seem to exist, however. The names for this particular section, for example, can be found on the DMV website, for example: http://www.dmv.ca.gov/pubs/vctop/vc/tocd2c2a2.htm Those DMV pages are unfortunately the exception that proves the rule. After seeing these Section names, it should be immediately obvious that these represent a crucial element of the codes that should be published along with the codes.Continue reading
Oregon once again claims that law is copyrighted
Oregon once again claims that law is copyrighted, by Cory Doctorow, BoingBoing, October 30, 2009. The Oregon Attorney General has asserted ownership over the "Attorney General's Public Record" and "Public Meeting Manual." See also:
- The Oregon Question: What is the copyright status of primary legal materials governing the actions of the citizens of Oregon?, Carl Malamud, Public.Resource.Org.
- Oregon Tries Claiming Copyright Over Gov't Materials Again, by Mike Masnick, techdirt, Oct 30th 2009.
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